Hamlet Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet will flatten you in several different and not entirely unpleasant ways
Alleva, Richard
Richard Alleva A SIXTEEN-WHEELER Branagh's 'Hamlet' Have you ever been run over by a truck and enjoyed the experience? Well... have you seen Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet? Hamlet is a...
...Enough...
...We see the prince about to murder the praying Claudius, and he does...
...Derek Jacobi as Claudius treats the passage with dispatch, but it is nevertheless forty-five seconds of pure Novocain injected directly into the viewer's brain...
...In the bedroom interview with Gertrude, Branagh is certainly angry enough, but he fails to register the subtler shades of desperation and loathing that this scene surely one of Shakespeare's greatest contains...
...Let Polonius ploddingly read Hamlet's love letter to Ophelia aloud to the king and queen and we hear only a stylized piece of whimsy ("Doubt thou the stars are fire"), but when Branagh intercuts the recitation with a glimpse of Hamlet and Ophelia making love, we experience the heat of passion beneath the rhetoric...
...And why was...
...Suffice it to say that I found Kate Winslet frighteningly believable as the mad Ophelia burbling obscenities and endearments...
...There are sliding doors, secret passages, and two-way mirrors in the palace: an Elsinore where courtiers must be so busy outmaneuvering each other that they have no time to strategize against the Norwegian foe...
...Using the beautiful lower range of his rather limited voice, Branagh speaks the first soliloquy, "O, that this too, too solid flesh," with a delectation of sadness that warns us that this man will never take the necessary steps to end that sadness...
...Of all the Bard's productions, Hamlet is the one that most resists the unifying hand of the director...
...At times his fast tempos do capture the manic quality that the prince can legitimately exhibit (the "Get thee to a nunnery" passage works brilliantly at a furious clip), but occasionally they flatten nuances...
...But, as Branagh portrays him, is the prince the right man for the job...
...Polonius is a stern paterfamilias with his children but sleeps with prostitutes on the sly, and his servant Reynaldo is clearly a pimp...
...Underpinning all this acting and the aptly lush costuming (Alex Byrne's) and photography (Alex Thomson's) is the eclectic score of Patrick Doyle, which employs clever pastiches of Brahms (the final funeral hymn) and Bernard Herrmann (the duel) to excellent effect...
...But Hamlet is not Henry V. There are other mistakes, major and minor, including a badly edited final sequence in which Fortinbras's takeover is ridiculously staged as an armed invasion...
...This theme is in the very first image: the statue of our hero's father, old King Hamlet...
...This Hamlet is the most jaw-dropping film ever made from any of Shakespeare's plays...
...Military uniforms are everywhere in the court but they seem to be only fashion statements even Ophelia wears one...
...In the graveyard, Branagh's hushed appreciation of the passing of all earthly joy gives us a vivid look at the self-thwarting nature of the prince...
...The delivery of "How all occasions do inform against me" is a disaster, turning a scorching piece of self-shaming into a gung ho, up-and-at-'em marital tirade...
...There's too much life in the man for him to be an agent of death...
...Here's why...
...Branagh, both as actor and director, makes us understand clearly why it is a "cursed spite" that Hamlet was born to set the times right...
...trying to prevent boredom led him into a problem with his own performance: he's turned the Dane into a bit of a speed freak...
...A man aware that death converts all flesh, whether Caesar's or Yorick's, into dirt fit to "stop a beer barrel" might very well be a good ruler...
...Shakespeare makes the point (properly underscored by Branagh) that Elsinore has become an armed camp against Fortinbras's approach...
...Sometimes these elements enrich the play, but just as often they bring its main action to a temporary halt...
...a sword thrust right through the skull...
...Only twenty dull minutes in a four-hour flick...
...Michael Maloney creates the best Horatio I've ever seen: a commoner warily treading amidst aristocratic skullduggery...
...There are about a score of these longueurs in the movie twenty minutes of tedium...
...When he should be detaching himself from events long enough to plan strategy, he instead savors the nuances of the moment...
...The monument evokes a martial ideal: warfare as an ongoing way of life and a promotion of all the virtues warfare requires self-sacrifice, sensual restraint, physical vigor, righteous fierceness, unity of purpose...
...The kingdom, under Claudius, is waylaid by its corruption...
...Frederick the Great and Winston Churchill surely had this awareness...
...Where is the center in all this abundance, in this sublime variety show of the questing human spirit...
...How well Branagh understands and cinematically exploits the two-track nature of the play, the parallel unfolding of melodramatic action alongside mental frenzy and exaltation...
...Branagh has ten thousand enemy soldiers charge Elsinore castle across an open plain without benefit of Birnam Wood camouflage and the sentries see nothing until the army gets within the walls...
...To praise the cast justly would require another article...
...the prince by his sensibility...
...The poet Karl Shapiro once wrote that being reviewed by the critic Randall Jarrell was like being run over by a truck that didn't hurt him...
...I have found some fault with the star's performance but, at its best, it is a successful portrait, not of a man paralyzed by indecision or an oedipal complex, but of a mettlesome, high-pitched nature sent zig-zagging out of control by the fury coursing within him...
...And it's not just fury that deprives this Hamlet of his internal compass...
...Nicholas Farrell is a burning Laertes...
...Consider: during the hatching of the plot to murder his nephew, Claudius remarks that Laertes's fencing has been much praised by a Norman gallant named Lamord, and for twenty-eight dawdling lines the finer points of Lamord are discussed when all we need to know is how much Hamlet envies Laertes's skill...
...And, with the exception of Robin Williams's cutesy-poo Osric, all the celebrity guest-starring pays off, especially Charlton Heston's First Player, the very model of a magniloquent actor-manager, and Jack Lem-mon's Marcellus, making every syllable of the "bird of dawning" speech poignantly pierce...
...But any man who too keenly savors such awareness will probably never rule...
...After murdering his brother, Claudius the usurper continues his brother's preparations for war against Norway, but we can see in the soft, sensual face of Derek Jacobi that Denmark has the wrong ruler if Denmark was meant to be a Viking version of Sparta...
...Derek Jacobi's Claudius is a supreme study of the connection between evil and weakness, while Julie Christie's Gertrude explores the callousness that can grow out of sexual infatuation...
...And so, in this context, when the ghost summons Hamlet it's not just a call for personal vengeance but a demand that the son restore the martial integrity of the state...
...Though the first half of "O what a rogue and peasant slave" plays nicely as a tantrum, the second half needs a transition into seething expectancy that the actor fails to give it...
...And why was Rufus Sewell, owner of the droopiest eyelids since Robert Mitchum's, allowed to turn the Norwegian prince into an oaf...
...But Branagh has found a center, a unifying idea that works for him and (at least while we view his movie) for us...
...The very next shot pulls us back into reality and the prince's doubts...
...Like Elsinore itself with its hectic military preparations, Branagh's Hamlet aspires to the sword in vain...
...Branagh was surely aware of the problem as he shot the movie...
...Run me over again, Shakespeare...
...But it is precisely because this Hamlet is four hours long that twenty minutes take a disproportionate toll on the attention span...
...But, wait, no, that was only a visual leap into Hamlet's mind...
...Hamlet is a jungle of a play and, as he guides us through it, Branagh refuses to wield a machete...
...But he hits the right note with the concluding couplet...
...It's not the complexity of the hero but the bursting nature of the play itself that is the problem...
...So much for self-sacrifice, sensual restraint, martial vigor, unity of purpose...
...Richard Briers undercuts our standard notions of Polonius by endowing the old man with shrewdness and venom...
...And, in fact, Branagh and his designers give us an Elsinore that evokes the Hapsburg dynasty in its late nineteenth-century decadence...
...Young men are constantly practicing swordplay within the palace, but it is the sort of fencing employed in private duels, useless on the battlefield...
...After being run over by this four-hour epic, I rose quite unbruised from my seat and felt like shouting, "Run me over again, Branagh...
...His magnificent, foolhardy movie gives us the text virtually uncut, with all its narrative detours, playful elaborations, obscure allusions, blatant and subtle jokes, topical gossip...
...Doubtless this was because Branagh placed his movie's intermission right after this soliloquy and wanted to give audiences a tingle just before their escape to the lobby...
Vol. 124 • March 1997 • No. 6
